A majority of current communication networks, such as digital cellular, provide data and voice services based on circuit switched technology. However, the utilization of transmission resources in circuit switching is suboptimal because the transmission connection is maintained throughout the contact, without regard as to whether information is being transmitted or not at any given moment. Transmission resources are shared by multiple users, which means the reservation of a circuit switched connection for a single subscriber to engage in data service unnecessarily ties up transmission resources that could otherwise be shared. The transmission resources could be shared by using packet data, where data comes in packets at irregular intervals, and as such, there are inactive periods where no data for a particular receiver is being transmitted. Thus, sharing the resources takes advantage of these periods of inactivity in one connection to provide service in other connections.
However, during peak periods of service, a single logical channel devoted to packet data, shared by many users, will result in an unacceptably slow connection for each subscriber. The prior art has addressed this by describing systems in which multiple adjacent logical channels are used to provide packet data service. While the enjoining of adjacent channels clearly provides more bandwidth, it has the disadvantage of reducing the number of circuit switched calls that can be made in the particular service cell. In addition, using adjacent channel is also unnecessarily inflexible, and does not take into consideration the fact that an adjacent channel may be in use by other services, and thus not available for use in transmitting packet data.
Furthermore, present wireless data services are implemented in a way that results in the subscriber unit monitoring the data channel continuously. When data is present in the data channel, monitoring is necessary, but frequently there are times when the system is waiting for data from a data source, and thus is not transmitting any data to the subscriber, and thus monitoring results in the mobile station unnecessarily using precious battery power. In solving this problem, the use of a dynamic data channel has been contemplated, such as that described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,598,417 to Crisler et al. (Crisler). In Crisler there is taught a method of dynamically configuring a data channel. However, Crisler fails to address the problem of how a mobile station accesses the data channel. Therefore there is a need, in a wireless communication system having a dynamic data channel for a method of accessing the dynamic data channel.